Nation-Building

An editorial in the Washington Post argues, counter-intuitively, that Barack Obama's fundraising success over the internet is not a death-knell for the public financing system, but rather all the more reason to reform it: According to an analysis by the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute of the fundraising totals through August 2008, the percentage of people whose total donations to Mr. Obama aggregated to $200 or less was 26 percent. That almost matches President Bush's 25 percent in the 2004 election. But Mr. Obama relied less on donors who gave $1,000 or more (47 percent) than Mr. Bush (60 percent). [...] Mr. Obama must lead a serious conversation about the role of the public financing system and how Internet fundraising should affect its structure. In an op-ed last month in The Post, Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer championed a new campaign finance system centered around the Internet. He proposed matching funds for small donations up to $200 per donor, incre...

Just one week ago, Patrick Ruffini at The Next Right was declaring the Obama campaign's decision to forgo public financing a " strategic miscalculation ". This analysis, made before the Obama campaign had actually released any actual numbers for June, was widely quoted and seized upon in almost desperate fashion by the increasingly panicked right-wing blogsphere. Ruffini made a case that the (predicted) poor fundraising numbers for June, rumored to be under $30 million, suggested that the 2008 general election was lacking in intensity relative to the primary or the 2004 general. It should be noted that the Obama campaign just released its numbers for June - and it was a doozy . $52 million, well above (reasonable) expectations. In fact, Jerome Armstrong argued it could have been higher: I believe that Obama could have raised $100M in June if that's what they wanted to do. In fact, there may have been plans to do just that too, but they changed. Notice that just $2M w...